Option Trading Blog

Today I spent all day at the Hilton Hotel for the Mathworks World Tour. For those who do not know, MathWorks is the company that develops MATLAB. If you haven’t heard about MATLAB, here is a quote from their webpage

MATLAB and companion toolboxes provide engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and educators with an environment for technical computing applications. These products serve a broad range of tasks across a variety of industries from automotive and electronics to industrial equipment and telecommunications.

MATLAB is also a powerful tool for developing financial models and so this got me interested. Until now, I did not understand how MATLAB would help me, because I thought I can code everything I want by myself! but, they have already built in functions that can save you a lot of time (a lot).

The event started at 9:15 with some general details about who uses MATLAB and why from the Israeli distributor of MATLAB. I can’t remember what has been said so I guess that means it wasn’t interesting. Then, Jason Kinchen, a MATLAB director got up on stage and supplied us with details about how MATLAB is great but not showing us it’s capabilities. The event kicked in when Sam Roberts, a senior application developer got up on stage and showed us some applications that MATLAB has. The first example was about an engineering problem which required optimization. Not my niche but it was nice. The nice examples came a bit later when he explained how MATLAB is used in finance. The example was about optimizing a portfolio. What impressed me was the speed of how things were done. All the functions are already built in which makes your work quite faster. I’m going to experiment with this and you my readers would get my programs to download freely! just don’t complain about bugs ;)

After the lunch break, we were separated into two rooms. In the first, they taught what is known as an introductory parallel computing course. The second course, which I attended, was called advanced computing with MATLAB. Sadly, advanced meant pretty boring things for me so I quit in the middle. But at least I got a free Sandisk!

Here is a picture from the event: